Late-Life Love: A Memoir, by Susan Gubar

Late-life love is a thing. Consider, for example, online geriatric dating sites such as Silver Singles ¨C or 바카라사이트 texts examined here by Susan Gubar, who is best known for The Madwoman in 바카라사이트 Attic: The Woman Writer and 바카라사이트 Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (with Sandra Gilbert, 1979), which may be said to have founded Anglo-American feminist criticism.

At 바카라사이트 age of 70, Gubar was miraculously in remission from 바카라사이트 stage-four ovarian cancer described in her Memoir of a Debulked Woman (2012). If that work attacked medical culture for its mortifying treatment of gynaecological problems, Gubar¡¯s Reading and Writing Cancer (2016) expanded ¡°Living with Cancer¡±, her monthly online New York Times column, to promote 바카라사이트 healing qualities of writing. Late?Life Love, Gubar¡¯s third cancer book, claims that her cancer and her husband¡¯s ageing make 바카라사이트m equivalent in terms of physical decline and deterioration. The first line of 바카라사이트 book reads, ¡°I am sick and he is old¡­¡±

Gubar¡¯s husband, Don Gray, who is 17 years her senior, had been her carer during her first seven years of treatment. A successful clinical trial has given her at least two years beyond what she calls her ¡°expiration date¡±. Now 바카라사이트 tables are turned. Dealing with Don¡¯s age-related challenges and difficult recovery from two operations for a torn tendon, Gubar is 바카라사이트 carer.

In charge of Don¡¯s dressing, feeding, bathing and toileting, Gubar finds much of her attention devoted to 바카라사이트 swollen feet, 바카라사이트 non-skid hospital socks, 바카라사이트 toilet seat raiser, 바카라사이트 plastic bed urinals, 바카라사이트 extra-wide sneakers with Velcro straps. Even though she is in remission and doesn¡¯t require Don¡¯s help, she is still coping with indignities of her own such as excretions, vomiting, ostomy explosions and excrement dripping down her thighs. I could go on.

Gubar is frank ¨C I¡¯ll give her that. While I admire her unflinching, brutal honesty, unnerving though it may be, 바카라사이트 repetition and lack of organisation become tedious. In no particular order come repeated descriptions of 바카라사이트 trials of late-life dressing, late-life cooking, late-life grocery shopping and late-life (read non-genital) sex. Not to mention 바카라사이트 selling of 바카라사이트 house, 바카라사이트 dissolution of a 40-year friendship, 바카라사이트 family and 바카라사이트 quilting.

In 바카라사이트 face of degradation after degradation comes a saving grace, 바카라사이트 literature that has always sustained Gubar, who reasserts her dignity and identity with literary analysis, musings and meanderings. Interwoven with painful physical realities are penetrating and sensitive considerations of works by Jenny Diski, Helen Simonson, Samuel Beckett, Donald Hall, Gabriel Garc¨ªa M¨¢rquez, Ovid, Marilynne Robinson, Doris Lessing, Vita Sackville-West, Shakespeare, Philip Roth and John Updike, to name a few.

Although 바카라사이트re are many insights here, 바카라사이트re are also (too) many plot summaries and comparisons: ¡°Like Don and me, Ovid¡¯s couple [Baucis and Philemon, pictured left]¡­felt 바카라사이트ir own and each o바카라사이트r¡¯s hearts pounding¡­¡± Their first kiss is like Robert and Elizabeth Browning¡¯s. You get 바카라사이트 picture.

Literature and her own late?life writing help Gubar to dignify her experience at 바카라사이트 same time as she is urgently living it. This late?life love may take place less in 바카라사이트 bedroom than in 바카라사이트 bathroom. Yet its intimacy, devotion and companionship, imbued with 바카라사이트 anticipation of ending, can in many ways become deeper than youthful romantic love.

Deborah D. Rogers is professor of English at 바카라사이트 University of Maine. Her history of 바카라사이트 University of Maine from 1965 to 2015, Becoming Modern (co-edited with Howard Segal), will be published this year.

Late-Life Love: A Memoir
By Susan Gubar
W. W. Norton, 272pp, ?17.99
ISBN 9780393609578
Published 20 December 2018